For decades, Germany’s approach to Israel rested on a politically protected consensus. Across the main parties, two assumptions held together a distinctive postwar settlement. Israel’s right to exist was treated as nonnegotiable, and Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust was understood to impose special obligations. That order has not broken down, but it has begun to lose its immunity. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza, the German debate has shifted